Search results for ""Author John Gallas""

"Fresh Air" is an exhilarating, freewheeling ride through landscapes and languages. The poems, all written on the move (tramping the Gobi desert, cycling in Irish drizzle, paddling in Tonga) have the fizz of travellers' tales, the enchantment and the melancholy of the open road. The "Story of Molecule" tells the tale of Molloy Gillies ('Molecule'), a semi-detached twelve-year-old who one night takes his bike from the shed and pedals off to escape Evolution. In Gallas' comical, heartbreaking sonnet-picaresque, Molecule encounters dangers, kindness, police cars and mauri on the roads of the South Island, while his father, his aunt, a bathroom fitter and a police chief wonder what life, and freedom, are all about. Together, these two books explore a world newly discovered in the imagination: 'Imagine: in the atlas of my soul / I could not make a thing so lovely.'

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John Gallas, who guided us around the world in his celebrated anthology The Song Atlas, here zooms in on Europe. The poems he perfects in English are chosen from the work of the famous (Akhmatova, Baudelaire, Pasolini) and the still-to-be-known (the Olafsson brothers, Renee Vivien, Yulia Zhadovskaya). Native speakers provide him with literal translations and the poems' sounds. Gallas then 're-poems' them. They constitute an exhilarating poetic journey across a continent and through time. All human life is here: love and despair, wild excess and wistful calm. Gallas understands the many musics of language. His book is a trove of the purest currency of Europe, poetry.

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In The Little Sublime Comedy John Gallas reanimates one of the great works of world literature for the twenty-first century. Relocated from medieval Italy to modern-day New Zealand, Dante’s Divine Comedy is given a new lease of life in Gallas’s darkly funny, surreal adaptation. Discovered snoozing on a mountainside above Lake Rotoiti, Mr Gallas – our millennial Dante – is taken under the wing by his Horatian guide, one Samuel Beckett. Over the course of 147 `songs’ we accompany the pair on their journey through the Bad Place, the Better Place and the Good Place, and witness the horrors and delights that befall the dead. On our way we encounter a skiing Pohutukawa Tree, a Golden Kiwi, Lineout the dog, a Vegetable Ewe, souls falling off things, Philosophy, and lots of bright, coloured lights. Divine order is replaced by modern Physics, by Klein bottles, super-speeds and black holes. Gallas’s Comedy is a metaphysical plunge through torment and triumph, as subtly satirical as it is unsubtly silly.

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John Gallas's new book is two volumes in one. The Coalville Divan builds on the poet's fascination with Eastern literature which he tends to experience in Leicester and its environs, where he lives and works. These poems ponder a number of his besetting themes. How dull is Wisdom, then? What it wants is Ungathering. The Coalville Divan makes moral, miniature movies out of the great scripts of old Persian sages, each of the one hundred sonnets returning a proverb to the particular lives, moments and places that made it. These little, colour narratives put Life back up there with its Meaning. Volume two has its mind on different things. If Beckett comes before Oort, and Fellini is next to the Unknown Soldier; if Alfred Schnittke can almost touch the muezzin who was a tape recorder, and William Bees VC is three steps away from a Mongolian marmot-killer, then it must be Excellent Men. Here are the lit-up males of a writer's heart, claimed by admiration, kinship, amazement, love, poetry and a good laugh. Each to his own.

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This collection opens in Mongolia with a poem called "Yoghurt". It is spring in Ulan Bator and Hoo Gerjan is seeking legal advice. This is the first of 12 narratives in the book interspersed with lyric moments such as one involving Samuel Beckett's telephone, a narrative ending with two blue dogs, "The Ballad of Robin Hood and the Deer", and a metaphysical narrative bringing a Christmas message from the Vatican.

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'It is the poet's job to invent beautiful falsehoods.' John Gallas's falsehoods are beautiful, ribald and audacious. Made from found language liberated from books, walls, the internet and radio, his forty lies construct an extravagant alternative reality of Russian assassins and magical shirts, Babylonian gardens, flying monks and the mathematics of Omar Khayyam. From Inner Mongolia to outer space, in tanka and sonnet and villanelle, Viking haiku and musical staves, Gallas collaborates with the print-maker Sarah Kirby to beguile the reader with stories and puzzles, and with pictures that create visual false memories of facts that never were.

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The Extasie is a compelling book of love poems with its lyrical roots deep in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the rural traditions of the nineteenth. Among New Zealand poet John Gallas's spirit guides are John Clare and, in particular, Wyatt and Donne, writers from our poetry's wittiest and most ecstatic age. But the book's heart is set firmly in the twenty-first century. Its two parts follow the seasons of a revelatory love through different weathers and forms. The poems follow the sequence of their composition, so we register the intimacies, forced separations, complexities and climaxes as on a lyrical fever chart. Things are never still or static, everywhere is growth and wonder - birds, tides, skies, trees, sheep, planets and flowers: a celebration of the natural world, and a seeing together. The eye of the poet is always turned to the world: how the world is seen and felt is a sufficient record of the partners' intimacy. Gallas's language is marked by vigorous verbs, arresting inversions, a world of process and mutation, of transformation about one constant belief. It is hard to find poetry so at ease and at home with the particular detail of rural England, of a Lincolnshire and Norfolk imbued with their own histories and a new-made sense of place.

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'Borel was the sun,' said Théophile Gautier, 'who could resist him?' Indeed, who? A lycanthrope, necrophile, absurd revolutionary, Paris dandy with a scented beard, flamboyant sufferer: a man with no grave and no memorial. His once celebrated red mouth opened briefly 'like an exotic flower' to complain of injustice and bourgeois vulgarity; of his frustration in love and reputation; of poverty and blighted fate. Then he withered in the minor officialdom of Algeria, where he died because he would not wear a hat, leaving a haunted house and a doubtful name. 'And now,' says his only biographer Dame Enid Starkie, 'he is quite forgotten.' Rhapsodies 1831 includes all the poems Borel wrote when he was twenty and twenty-one. The poems, he said, are 'the slag from my crucible': 'the poetry that boils in my heart has slung its dross'. It is a fabulous, fiery, black-clouded dross: captains and cutlasses, castles, maidens, daggers, danger; calls to arms, imagined loves, plaints and howls of injustice. 'Never did a publication create a greater scandal,' Borel said, 'because it was a book written heart and soul, with no thought of anything else, and stuffed with gall and suffering'. It was not reviewed. Now it is back.

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